Women on the Verge

Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

For years, acceptable portrayals of Soviet women in art were limited to the ideal proletariat, a strong-jawed woman with flashing eyes and scythe in hand, or the fairy tale Snow Queen in furs.

It’s no surprise that the realistic short stories and pessimistic plays of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who began writing in the 1960s, were banned until glasnost. Her bleak fictions depicted Soviet women as the human workhorses they were. They did not live in castles or picturesque garrets but in mini-gulags, subdivided apartments, which deprived the generations of families and strangers forced to cohabitate of any sense of privacy. (As a child, Petrushevskaya and her mother lived under a desk in her mentally ill grandfather’s room.) Her work was suppressed because she matter-of-factly described the horrors of domestic life in a society that abolished the self.

Many of Petrushevskaya’s stories can be considered fantastic. Her breakout book in America, “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby,” was cheekily marketed as “Scary Fairy Tales.” These stories teemed with grotesque and supernatural elements that masked the real terror: how unrelenting misery transforms human beings into monsters.

The new collection, “There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself,” is slyly subtitled “Love Stories.” These 17 tales, selected and translated by Anna Summers, who herself grew up in those “cramped, ghoulish blocks of apartments,” follow Petrushevskaya’s writing career from her first published story in 1972 to one published on her 70th birthday in 2008. They are deeply unromantic love stories told frankly, with an elasticity and economy of language. The characters are often pathetic, incomprehensible. “Doctor Zhivago” this ain’t.

The first lines of the first story, “A Murky Fate,” establish the tone and themes of the book: “This is what happened. An unmarried woman in her 30s implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.” The lover turns out to be her co-worker — a slovenly, narcissistic married man. The next day she discovers that despite their dispassionate and perfunctory encounter, she is madly in love. Is it possible that she truly desires this toad? Or does she just want to enter the kingdom of tragic women who have loved and lost? Does it matter? Is it so wrong to want to have a love story?

A few stories capture a character in a Chekhovian moment of clarity; some read like family lore, recounted without fanfare or urgency; others echo the gossip women exchange like currency. What is consistent is the dark, fatalistic humor and bone-deep irony Petrushevskaya’s characters employ as protection against the biting cold of loneliness and misfortune that seems their birthright.

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Illustration by Zoë Taylor

Even when a story ends with the narrator suggesting that a couple lived happily ever after, it rings false. We suspect the teller has tired of the story and is deliberately concluding on a mawkish note. What one can cling to is reward enough — a home, even if shared with a host of other miserables; children, even if they are scheming to steal your money and your home; a man, even if he is unfaithful, abusive and unpredictable.

The strongest piece, “Young Berries,” which seems to draw on Petrushevskaya’s own life, recalls a young girl’s stay at a sanitarium where she faces down bullies, finds her voice and begins to write. The narrator becomes infatuated with a beautiful and cruel boy who is drawn to her “whiff of shame.” He mocks and torments her, but her victory is in her survival. “The circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; the terror remained among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of young berries.”

Characters and settings seem to reappear hazily. Is the woman in “A Happy Ending” scheming to take over her ­mother-in-law’s apartment a grown-up iteration of the 15-year-old girl in “Hallelujah, Family” who gives birth to a child she despises? Do we see the same communal apartment through different characters’ eyes in different stories? The sense of sameness, the repetition of landscape, circumstance and emotion is disconcerting.

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Petrushevskaya’s female characters resemble nothing so much as Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, hollow women with a succession of smaller hollow women inside them, with the only solid figure a baby at the core. Maternal love trumps all. Children are the center that holds parents together. Children, even unborn children, console women when the men inevitably leave. We see, again and again, how, in the absence of a child to care for, a man will do, especially if he is abusive, deranged or suitably helpless. So haunted by loss is the elderly woman in “Tamara’s Baby” that she takes in a lunatic man she meets at a health resort, scandalizing her family and friends. While their coupling might be perverse, their mutual need is undeniable.

It seems fitting that a book that opens with “A Murky Fate” should end with the tongue-in-cheek “Happy Ending,” in which a woman, wounded by the emotional abandonment of her son, betrayed by her philandering husband who has also infected her with gonorrhea, secretly inherits an apartment, which enables her to escape. In her absence, her husband is unable to wash or feed himself, or even use a telephone. The discovery that he has become as vulnerable as an infant gives her permission and reason to return.

For these women, telling their stories is as necessary as having someone to care for. They tell stories, while waiting in endless lines for bread and trains and promotions that will never come, to feel less lonely. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Petrushevskaya loves her female characters too much to idealize their lives. Their husbands cheat and beat them, but these women take lovers. They have their work and their children. They may not have the heart to throw the bastards out or lock the door against them, but these women hold the keys.

THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO SEDUCED HER SISTER’S HUSBAND, AND HE HANGED HIMSELF

Love Stories

By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Translated by Anna Summers

171 pp. Penguin. Paper, $15.

Elissa Schappell is the author of “Blueprints for Building Better Girls,” a collection of linked stories.

A version of this review appears in print on February 17, 2013, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Women on the Verge. Today's Paper|Subscribe